How to import more than 256 columns from excel into SAS

[devsas]

Dear All,

Thanks so much for this wonderful forum. I'm a SAS newbie and without this forum I would have been completely lost!

I have a somewhat basic question, but I'm unable to find an appropriate answer to that. I have huge excel sheets with around 1000 columns and almost million rows. When I import these sheets into my SAS ( I have base SAS 9.3 at work and 9.2 at work-home computer..excel 2010 version), SAS only imports until 256 columns (variables) and all rows associated with these 256 columns. I'm not sure how to get around this problem as I have many such sheets and right now I have to break each excel sheet into 4 first before importing. I wish I could import the whole sheet at once.

Any suggestions?

Thanks!

[RichardinOz]

Have you tried exporting from Excel as a TAB delimited (.txt) file and then importing the data into SAS that way?

Richard

[ping]

EG can handle >256 columns. Looks like EG first convert Excel to text then import.

[Dingdang]

I habe the same problem and just tried pings suggestion with EG. but still, i only got 255 variables into sas.